Post by Thrawn in [devlog] Blooming Nightshade

Yuri Game Jam 2017 » Community

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This is the first time I've played a VN without any character art whatsoever. At first I thought "ugh, this is just too cheap", but in essence, even with background art and music being there, it works more like reading a book. As in, your mind will simply create the characters or their looks for you in your head while reading. I'm surprised that the lack of portraits didn't bother me too much in the end. It still just kinda works.

Also, I do like the girls, they're pretty interesting.

Haven't played all routes yet, but I think it's safe to say: Not so bad after all. :)

Ah, and this is also the first VN ever which I found to be available as an .apk file for Android. Also tested it briefly on my Blackberry KeyOne using Android 8.1, and yep, it works fine! :)

Jackkel Dragon6 years ago

Glad to hear you liked the game so far! I'm particularly glad that the lack of character art wasn't too upsetting, since I've been too busy with my other project to try to get the character art made for this game. (Hopefully I'll be able to get everything finished for this game eventually, but I'd like to get my main project done first.)

It's also nice to hear that the Android version is getting some play. Part of the original design goal was to make a GL romance game for Android, since there was next to nothing of the sort on Google Play in 2017 (aside from a few PC ports of other Ren'Py games).

At any rate, I hope you like the rest of the game.

Thrawn6 years ago (2 edits) (+1)

I see, that would be Eldritch Academy, right? Hmm, looks interesting enough, I think I'm going to buy it! :)

About Android: To be honest, I only played it on my phone for a short while. You see, my main workstations' monitor is a 30" screen, and that's just so much better for playreading visual novels... And on top of that, I got a kinda jury-rigged 80" home cinema as well, which is even more suited for this kind of thing...

I still like the idea though, because I think that games and/or visual novels or just any kind of software should support as many platforms as possible. :) By the way, where's the Linux support? If you can build for Mac and Android, Linux should be doable as well, right? Just asking, because aside from FreeBSD UNIX, I'm only using Android, Windows and Linux... So Linux support would be welcome!

Edit: Ah, wait? Are the Linux versions included in the "PC" releases? Uh, if so, I've overlooked that, my apologies!

Jackkel Dragon6 years ago

Thanks for taking a look at Eldritch Academy, I hope you like it!

For this game, the "PC" build should work with Linux, from what I'm told. (The Ren'Py distribution builder says that it should work on both Windows and Linux. When it packages for just one or the other, it uses "Windows" or "Linux" as the build name.) That said, I have no Linux devices to test on, so it could be helpful to hear if this is true.

Thrawn6 years ago (2 edits)

Yes, it does work. The presence of a shell script launcher ("Eldritch Academy.sh") and the 32 & 64 bit linux library folders in lib/ already indicate that. I tried it on Debian 8 x64 Linux just now, and the game does work, as long as the user knows how to make it launch. ;)

Since you're distributing the game in a non-POSIX compliant way (.zip archives), POSIX permissions aren't preserved. So, to make the game work, you have to enter the game directory and make the game binary and its launcher script executable first (here, I'm doing that for both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions):

$ chmod +x ./Eldritch\ Academy.sh
$ chmod +x ./lib/linux-x86_64/Eldritch\ Academy
$ chmod +x ./lib/linux-i686/Eldritch\ Academy

After that, it can be launched like this from within the main game directory:

$ ./Eldritch\ Academy.sh

I just didn't pay enough attention at first, which is how I missed the fact that your game already supports Linux, my apologies for that!

I have no experience with the Ren'Py builder myself, but to make the game work on Linux out of the box, the builder would need to package the files in a POSIX-compliant .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar.xz or similar archive and set the executable permissions for you.

But it's no big deal, as most Linux users are likely to figure such things out by themselves anyway.

So, I'm off to playread Eldritch Academy! :)

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